“I wish the bastards dead,” said Mark Rylance. The audience laughed and gasped. It’s not usually a funny line. In Act Four of Richard III, Shakespeare’s psychopathic king is ordering the murder of two children. But when the instruction arrived clear as ice water out of Rylance’s mouth, those five words – by some alchemy[…]
A dispatch from the war in the Central African Republic Nobody could tell me the dead man’s name. It was a little after nine on an oven-hot late January morning in the district of Combattants in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. The man had been lynched by a mob only minutes earlier.[…]
Sebastian Junger believed he knew about war. He had reported on conflict for nearly two decades: in the Balkans, West Africa and Afghanistan. He had been shot at. He had watched soldiers die. With the British photographer Tim Hetherington he had made Restrepo, an Oscar-nominated film about an American platoon’s 15-month deployment in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley,[…]
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Junior enters his sitting room, dressed as Tom Wolfe. It’s mid-September in New York City and hot out. Wolfe, who is 81 years old and lean as a racing greyhound, is wearing a chalk-white linen suit and a cerulean-blue shirt, a white pocket handkerchief with navy trim, leather spectator spat boots in[…]
At around 2.50pm on 3 January 2012, Court 16 at the Old Bailey fell quiet. The room was not silent exactly. A murder trial is rarely still enough for silence. Among the dozens of assembled lawyers, jurors, journalists, members of the public, relatives of the victim, defendants, policemen and court staff, someone is usually whispering,[…]
When the first call came, Anshul Gupta was dead to the world. It was 7.50am on Tuesday 2 February, 2010. Normally, Gupta would have been showered and suited by this time. He was, and is, a wealthy man with a senior position in a multinational coal-mining firm, and he did not ascend India’s corporate ladder[…]
It’s not an image I remember best from the match, but a sound. At seemingly incongruous moments in the fifth set of last year’s first round tie between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, the crowd on Court 18 at the All England Club emitted a nervous, collective giggle. Wimbledon crowds don’t usually giggle. Of course,[…]
Far removed from the Kenya of beach resorts and safaris, the Dadaab refugee camps on the country’s border with Somalia are home to 300,000 people displaced by its volatile neighbour’s civil war. For Islamic terrorist group al-Shabaab, the camp’s children are easy targets for recruitment. Is this supposedly safe haven the breeding ground for the[…]
On a bitter, bright September morning in 2006, I stood with my translator on the gravel outside Chita airport, in Siberia, considering my options. We were in a fix. Having already flown seven hours from Moscow on a Kruschev-era rustbucket, we were still half a day’s journey from our destination. Siberia is that kind of place. Our problem was[…]
Before he discovered his mistress was talkative, before Claridge’s lost a Michelin star, before a debt crisis threatened to scuttle his business, before he breached the covenants on a 10.5million pound loan, before he was halfway lynched for abusing an Australian television presenter, before the smudges in his official biography were exposed, before the critical[…]